H. L. Mencken Quotes About Country

• The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Hate, Patriotism

• Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

  H. L. Mencken

  Love, Country, Patriotic

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.616, Vintage

• American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Achievement, Journalism

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.95, Knopf

• What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, World, Tables

• Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Mistake, Science

• For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Men, Practice

• To large numbers of American citizens life in certain parts of the country becomes intolerably hazardous. They may be seized on any pretext, however flimsy, and put to death with horrible tortures. No government pretending to be civilized can go on condoning such atrocities. Either it must make every possible effort to put them down or it must suffer the scorn and contempt of Christendom.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Government, Lynching

• The taboos that I have mentioned are extraordinarily harsh and numerous. They stand around nearly every subject that is genuinely important to man: they hedge in free opinion and experimentation on all sides. Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States, but here the critic is silenced. The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, War, Men

• If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Harry Truman, Body

• To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and (c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am - a man of my peculiar weakness, vanities, appetites, and aversions - can be so happy as he can be in the United States.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Men, Vanity

  "On Being An American". Book by H. L. Mencken, 1922.

• It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Art, Society

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.562, Vintage

• The real charm of the United States is that it is the only comic country ever heard of.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Real, United States

• Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Men, Iron

  "More Tips for Novelists". "Chicago Tribune" Newspaper, May 2, 1926.

• At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Country, Men

  H. L. Mencken (1924). “Prejudices Fourth Series”

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